


Lost in Transit

by changdictator



Category: iKON (Kpop)
Genre: M/M, Model AU, copious angsting, fucked up fairy jinhwan
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-05-24 20:22:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6165622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/changdictator/pseuds/changdictator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somewhere, where weaker hearts have made a home, Hanbin fell through his own fingers in flakes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost in Transit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jongins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jongins/gifts).



The boy with hair in his eyes—he’s a new face, but that’s nothing.

 

You know how it is. In an industry that greases its gears on the constant crush of people ticking in, tocking out, every face is a new face. There’s nothing tragic about it. You can’t sell youth as commodity without sharpening your teeth on fresh blood. 

 

Hanbin knows how it is. He gotten used to reading expiration dates. The day he went pro, when June confessed he couldn’t remember who Kim Hanbin was anymore, Hanbin read the first one right off June’s washed out smile. He was right. June quit the next morning.

 

But this boy here, with his spine a discrete, tensed line jutting out like a question mark, wears fatigue as if he’s been, will be here lifetimes. There’s no date on him--and that’s something.

 

“I’m Bobby. We’re here backstage at G-Dragon’s spring collection,” he recites. The camera pans from him to the make-up artist dusting synthetic stardust over his hair. “It’s all about the pop and sparkle today.”

 

Hanbin inspects him silently through the thick suspension of glitter between them. Textbook jawline, clichéd eyes, dollar-store cheekbones. Apparently god’s slapped everything G-Dragon can’t stand onto one canvas. How a face like that wandered into a show like this, Hanbin wouldn’t know and doesn’t care, only that he does.

 

“Bobby, can we get you in a shot with B.I?”

 

Hanbin leans in with that disaffected look he’s been cultivating all season. The boy drapes an arm over his shoulder, pulls him in closer like he’s done it before.

 

There are two shots. One of the polaroids is left behind for keepsake.

 

When the boy asks if Hanbin wants it, Hanbin says, “Actually, it’s the summer collection.”

 

“Sorry?”

 

“G-Dragon doesn’t do spring.”

 

The boy opens his mouth to respond. Hanbin looks at him but doesn’t wait. Neither would anyone else. This industry is one that runs on fresh blood, after all. People in, people out. If you hold on too long, you’ll be run out just like the rest of them.

 

The camera gets an angle on him walking away. That’s the cut that makes it into the BTS reel.

 

 

 

~

 

 

  
Breakfast at Jinhwan’s means potato cake topped with home-cured bacon, apple puree, avocado, egg; at the core, white pudding of minced suet and brain stuffed in a hog casing, seasoned in brines of brown sugar and fried golden brown. Jinhwan ladles a cherry sauce across the porcelain as Hanbin slumps against the wall, barefoot, dropping a duffel bag on the ground.

 

“You’re already up?” asks Jinhwan.

 

Hanbin watches Jinhwan wipe the edge of the plate with a towel. “I’ve been up.”

 

Jinhwan sets the plate on a napkin by the breakfast island, where the chandelier light has fractured into a mosaic beneath the cutlery. From a distance Jinhwan looks remarkably young, still a kid in his father’s clothes. Sweet and harmless. When he catches Hanbin looking, he smiles with his entire face. Sometimes Hanbin falls for this. “Well, come sit.”

 

“You flew me half-way across earth at 3AM for a tea party?”

 

This, Jinhwan doesn’t answer. His tie is loose around his neck, shirt pushed up past his elbows, hair disheveled. Hanbin can tell exactly what Jinhwan wants.

 

Those trinkets he gifts Hanbin, the penthouse apartments, the suits laid out on his bed, the grand pianos, the business class flights to Macau, Barbados, Tangier offered like movie tickets—they aren’t free. Sure, Jinhwan’s charming, gentle, the clean polished edge of sophistication, but he is never charitable. Jinhwan doesn’t trifle with non-profits.

 

After a beat, he asks, “How was Tokyo?”

 

This time, Hanbin doesn’t answer. Instead he strips off his leather jacket, tosses it over the kitchen sink, and walks to Jinhwan, who matches his steps in parallel, until they’re backed up against the counter top.

 

“I missed you,” He says, and kisses Jinhwan. He’s sloppy and eager, the way Jinhwan likes him.

 

Jinhwan doesn’t kiss him back. Instead, he says, “On your knees,” gaze stony and unfaltering. When Hanbin's there, staring at the polished glare of Jinhwan's leather lace-ups, he wrenches his head up by a fistful of hair. “Look at me. Open your mouth.”

 

It's already late afternoon when Hanbin wakes, sun on chaffed shoulders, alone beneath the cold whisper of satin sheets. Today there’s a ring of keys beneath the pillow and a note that says, “ _Be nicer to the windows this time_.”

 

 

 

  
~

 

 

 

 

“B.I! I mean, Mr... B.I, hi.”

 

Hanbin pulls down his hoodie drawstrings and walks faster. Around him Paris is lined with windowsill gardens, rusty bicycles, and an uninterrupted assortment of boulangeries all pressed under a milky blue patch of sky. It’s lovely and scenic except the last thing Hanbin wants is to be photographed in it.

 

“It’s me, Bobby. Tokyo? G-Dragon? Spring collection?”

 

He turns on his heel. Bobby, who had been chasing him, barely avoids ramming into Hanbin by crashing into the parking meter instead.

 

“I don’t think I’ve ever introduced myself,” says Hanbin. Not that he’s going to. At least not to someone who wears his pants inside out for, god forbid, fashion’s sake.

 

“Oh,” The boy--Bobby--says, stiff, nervous, nothing Hanbin hasn’t already seen before. Without the makeup and the stage lights double-exposed over his silhouette, the uneasiness brightens him. Cute. “I saw your name on the face roster backstage… but actually, that’s a lie. I knew—well, I mean, _everyone_ knows who you are, sir. Mr. B.I, sir.”

 

Hanbin knows he’s waiting for a response but he doesn’t care to give one, so the boy ambles on, ever more frayed, “Um, my name’s Bobby. I thought I should introduce myself, since we’re the only Koreans walking New York this year… Mr. B.I. Sir.”

 

“Mr. Bobby,” Hanbin says, extending his arm for a handshake. “Nice to meet you.”

 

He’s doing it out of courtesy, but Bobby catches it with both hands, beaming so wide all that’s left on his face are teeth and crow’s-feet and Hanbin--

 

Hanbin hates that.

 

“Nice to meet you too, Mr. B.I, sir. I’ve just got to say what a total honor—”

 

“My name is Kim Hanbin,” Hanbin says, watching Bobby shake his hand by the elbow, as if he was planning on breaking it off and taking it home with him.

 

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Hanbin,” Bobby shouts, savagely optimistic, then itches the back of his head and laughs. He’s got a laugh that says they’ve known each other for a million years: open, vulnerable, totally frank and exposed, a bare-knuckled punch to the nose. It knocks Hanbin right off his train of thought.

 

He hates that too.

 

“There’s just something ironic about knocking off Topshop, isn’t there?”

 

Bobby looks down at his outfit, then at Hanbin indiscreetly staring down his jeans, and breaks into a deafening shout that sends Hanbin back a step. “My mom bought these for me,” he says, disconcerted and wildly scandalized, “from Walmart. But look, hot pockets!”

 

Sticking his hands in his pocket, Hanbin thinks this is when he should look disenchanted. He’s good at it. He’s done it a lot.

 

He doesn’t, because it’s too late. He’s laughing already. And beside him, Bobby’s got the sun trapped in the amber of his eyes, rushing into the tight golden knot of his smile.

 

If only you could hate that.

 

 

 

  
~

 

 

 

  
With Jinhwan, the sun never rises. That’s why it’s easy to lose grip on where you are. The first time they met, Jinhwan had been sitting at the end of the Marc Jacobs runway in Paris, sandwiched between Tom Ford and the astigmatic dragon lady from Vogue China. Hanbin recognized him immediately. Not an enormous feat. There were only so many twenty-something multi-billionaires in the world, after all.

 

Back then Jinhwan had seemed young, harmless, out of place. Hanbin remembers wondering if he was the real thing. Kim Jinhwan, who could have the entire Silicon Valley on their toes with a distracted tap of the pen, who dined regularly in the circles of political heavyweights you’d only see on TV, played chess with entire cities on the board--how could he have been so tiny?

 

“You should see him with his wife,” said June, backstage. “They look like a pair of chipmunks together.”

 

The next time, Jinhwan had passed Hanbin at the door of a Barcelona coffee shop, unannounced, uninvited, in khakis and a threadbare sweater Hanbin never imagined he could own. It was late afternoon and cold, the kind that comes at your throat with the precipice of winter. Out of courtesy, Hanbin pretended not to have recognized him. He ordered a small latte and, as he pulled out his wallet to pay, Jinhwan spoke up in fluent Spanish from behind him.

 

“I’ve got it."

 

Hanbin knew but he asked anyway. “And you are?”

 

“A fan of yours,” answered Jinhwan, all smiles, none of which reached his eyes. He paid with a hundred-euro bill and didn’t bother with the change.

 

When the coffee arrived, Hanbin wasn’t sure if he could drink it, the hundred-euro latte. Hanbin wasn’t stupid. He knew what something like this meant, coming from the likes of Kim Jinhwan.

 

“Funnily enough,” Hanbin said, eyeing the thick wedding band on Jinhwan’s finger. “I thought you were going to say you were married.”

 

Jinhwan met his eyes, a straight, solid line behind the rim of his mug, the gaze of someone who had never been refused before. “Is that a problem?”

 

Hanbin thought about it. “I have a boyfriend.”

 

“And is that a problem?”

 

Outside the coffee shop, a Rolls Royce had pulled up by the curb, and before him, Jinhwan suddenly seemed older. A thousand years older. The tip of a shark fin slicing past smooth waters without resistance.

 

“No.”

 

“Good.” Jinhwan put a cell phone on the table. “You should know, I don’t like speaking to answering machines.”

 

And that was that.

 

 

 

  
~

 

 

 

  
In New York, winters are categorized as humid subtropical but all Hanbin registers is frost over window panes and wind biting his ears. He speaks in wisps of white smoke and trembles his way into the corridors, past the flesh hangers and the linen racks. The shivers are still in his bones as waves of hands and tools and numbing neon lights bury him whole.

 

A few meters away, Bobby’s stationed at the corner, bowed over playing on his phone while an older woman paints him new cheekbones. He doesn’t look as nervous as he was at G-Dragon, but then again, this circuit’s has always been sink or swim. Bobby wouldn’t be working here if he wasn’t born swimming. Not that Hanbin cares, no.

 

“Fancy seeing you here.” A hand pulls his chin in the opposite direction. Donghyuk’s already got a smear of primer over Hanbin’s nose before Hanbin can manage a proper Hello.

 

“Please,” says Hanbin. “I’m everywhere.”

 

“Up your own ass, for example?” Donghyuk grins, dabbing charcoal over Hanbin’s lids. “Faring all right up there?”

 

“Better than you, I’d surmise.”

 

“Mr. Hanbin,” someone says, cutting through the clutter of white noise behind them, “Hi.”

 

It’s Bobby.

 

“ _Mr._ Hanbin?” Donghyuk echoes, squinting at the two of them. “Kid, you don’t have to be scared of a loser like him.”

 

Bobby’s eyebrow fly mid-way up his face so quickly Hanbin can’t decide if it’s more comical or tragic. Someone takes a picture of it. The flash goes off in his pupil. “Sorry?”

 

Hanbin ignores it. “Mr. Bobby, meet asshole, an old friend. Asshole, Mr. Bobby, a new friend.”

 

A few stations away, someone calls Bobby for a fitting check, the second time now. Bobby’s entire body jerks in response, hooked on an invisible wire. He should know better, Hanbin thinks. Someone prepossessing enough to turn every head on his way down the plank shouldn’t play by the rules. Besides, with the odd permutation of mistakes he’d built his face on, Bobby is a lighthouse in the dark. They’ll find him. They need him.

 

“I should head back--”

 

Hanbin’s already stopped him with a hand on his wrist.

 

“No. Stay,” he says, paying no heed to the way Donghyuk’s brush hesitates between them. “If you don’t let them want you, they won’t remember you.”

 

“But you remembered me,” Bobby says, a nascent smirk dragging up one cheek, hook, line, and sinker. So maybe he wasn’t just born swimming. Maybe he was born a shark.

 

Hanbin doesn’t manage to find his voice until a long beat later, and then it comes out a pitch too high. “I remember everyone.”

 

 

 

  
~

 

 

 

 

In the beginning, Jinhwan only took Hanbin out shopping. A winter jacket. Shoes. Vintage books and records that held their weight in gold. Then, suits that poured around him like molten capital. Later, an endless stream of headphones and watches and instruments that Hanbin didn’t know how to play was interrupted only by trips to Michelin-star restaurants buried in the heart of Monte Carlo and Copenhagen, where Jinhwan spoke only of his family, his dog, the weather, dull little things you’d pick up on an elevator ride down any business construction.

 

For a long time, Hanbin thought all of it was some extended candid camera, that one day, a film crew would come out saying, “Got you,” with scripts in hand.

 

Then, one day, Jinhwan flew Hanbin into his London office. There was a report was laid out squared in the center of the desk, and to the right of it, Jinhwan was leaning on one of the bookshelves, a bottle of Scotch in hand and his reading glasses folded and tucked neatly in his breast pocket, pouring himself a drink. He’d taken his tie off. His shirt collar was just slightly open, enough for Hanbin to make out the dip of his collarbones when he moved to put the Scotch back.

 

He told Hanbin to bend over his desk. Bend over and put his elbows to the tables and read his report aloud. Hanbin had no idea what Jinhwan was playing at until three sentences in, he hit him on the ass, over the cotton of his trousers. Pain, a pulsating swell of heat, licked across Hanbin’s flesh.

 

He kept reading, voice trembling, the desk shaking under his hands each time Jinhwan’s palm slammed against his ass cheeks. Without a word, Jinhwan continued spanking him like that, meticulous and steady, one hit at the end of every other sentence, punctuated with a hitch in Hanbin’s voice.

 

Hanbin read the report again and again, the words a mess of syllables and drool and tears, and Jinhwan spanked him and spanked him. When Jinhwan was finished, Hanbin turned around and, knowing nothing else, mouthed, fuck me.

 

The way Jinhwan looked at Hanbin then was lukewarm and indifferent. It cut right through the heat and coiled want he’d riled up inside of Hanbin, made him feel as if he wasn’t worth the air he breathed.

 

“Pull yourself together,” Jinhwan said, sharp and dry. “I’ll see you later.”

 

That afternoon, Hanbin found a Volvo waiting outside the hotel lobby. A man he didn’t recognize delivered the keys and a note that said in a neat black scrawl, friend of mine.

 

Hanbin stared at the key, at the way it fit perfectly into his palm, at the ugly fate line sectioning off his thumb. He turned it over, and again.

 

By convention, this is not how you began a relationship, not when you’re eighteen, when you still believe people are capable of the love you’ve seen playing out on the theatre screen. But by convention, Hanbin and Jinhwan, they weren’t in relationship. Jinhwan was married. His wife was expecting. Behind Hanbin, June was waiting in a diner somewhere, two hours into a date that was never going to happen.

 

Then again, Hanbin was eighteen. At that age, you aren’t greedy for love. You don’t need a relationship. You don’t want to sit in a diner with your childhood best friend eating discount family-meal spaghetti. You want to be bad. You want to be wanted. You want to be fucked in a bathtub of cash, on a million-dollar yacht, off the coast of a private island.

 

After that, time began vaporizing. Money devalued. Cities blurred together into an endless stream of colors. Somewhere, where weaker hearts have made a home, Hanbin fell through his own fingers in flakes.

 

He stopped trying to remember.

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

  
Backstage Burberry, they’re tucked away squatting behind a row of ball gowns, albeit still close enough to the eye of the hurricane to make out the shrill nasal scream of the megaphones going off. Bobby offers Hanbin the bag of potato chips as someone shouts, “Where for fuck’s sake is B.I? Do I have to open this fucking show myself?”

 

A beat.

 

“We lost him,” Someone else confesses meekly.

 

Bobby meets Hanbin’s eyes, already tittering. Hanbin presses a warning finger over his lips, then feeds him a chip. Bobby chews, swallows, opens wide for another.

 

“What do you mean, you lost him? He’s not a dog,” Megaphone snaps.

 

Hanbin dignifies the remark with an emotive puppy impression and beside him, Bobby is immediately reduced to tears, shoulders shaking with mute wails of laughter. Hanbin glances at Bobby, who’s busy clapping him on the shoulder like an enthusiastic seal. He looks like an idiot.

 

And the next thing, so does Hanbin.

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

 

  
Outside, Sunday begins with the stark edge of a concrete building, a limp flyer blowing aimlessly through the street, and behind them the night sky an indefinite, charcoal grey ceiling. Hanbin falls back into the car seat. It’s midnight. He smells of sex and Jinhwan’s cologne, sweet spice and leather.

 

“Jimin’s going to be back early,” Jinhwan had said, when he hung up the phone, and Hanbin had understood. He always understands. It’s better to leave than to be replaced. Jinhwan had kissed him chaste on the forehead and Hanbin crawled out of the bed, pulled his trousers up, and fumbled his way to the back door.

 

“Where to?” The cab driver asks presently.

 

When Hanbin opens the window, his breath comes out in a cloud of condensation, suspended in the darkness of the night. There are no stars tonight. The sky is a woolly sort of gray. _Home_ , he wants to say. _Please take me home_. Except he’s twelve thousand kilometers away from it, stranded in the middle of a city he’s forgotten the name of, speaking a language he can’t remember having learnt, blowing a man under his desk, over which sits a loving photo of his trophy wife, for little play mansions and little toy cars. Maybe he doesn’t even have a home anymore.

 

So instead he says, “Somewhere fun. Somewhere loud.”

 

Thirty minutes later, Hanbin slides onto a stool in the back of a club half way across town, a mess of plastered kids and their glow-in-the-dark body paint and decides, close enough.

 

The person who slides into the spot to his right says. “You didn’t come alone, did you, Mr. Hanbin?”

 

Bobby. Hanbin would recognize that train engine timber two miles away under water.

 

He finishes his drink before turning to look at Bobby. A cheap leather jacket, a fast, loud grin, a tragic waste of skin, Bobby is all of that tonight. Young blood, Hanbin thinks, daring only because you’re too young to understand what scares you. This side of him looks vaguely familiar, like a face on one of those street-corner magazines vendors that everyone sees at but never quite looks at.

 

“I don’t plan on leaving alone, Mr. Bobby, if that’s what you’re asking,” Hanbin says.

 

“Leaving to where, though?” Bobby asks. Hanbin watches the way his jaw moves when he speaks. He pulls his tie loose, unbuttons his shirt until he feels a sliver of cold air rushing over his chest. The drink he ordered has a sharp and sour aftertaste, like a volatile shot to the vein.

 

“Why would I tell a stranger?”

 

Some kind of dance off starts behind them; the club blasts two notches up the Richter scale and Bobby yells, “My name’s Jiwon. Kim Jiwon. Nice to meet you!” in case Hanbin can’t hear over the bass thumping off the walls. But he really doesn’t need to. Hanbin doesn’t care. Fresh blood, young blood. People in, people out.

 

“I liked Bobby better,” Hanbin says. Bobby jerks back, face scrunching up in an excited shout. It’s cute how Bobby is such an open book off the runway, when he’s removed from the spotlight and lenses. Hanbin orders another shot, drinks, and ambles off into the dance floor, grazing against the tangle of skin and heat. Behind him, Bobby follows, hand around his wrist, chin low, blue steel eyes, lethargy dragging at his feet.

 

In this light, Bobby’s different. He’s older, overwhelming, all unbridled energy and wanton ambition. This is the kind of carbon that makes galaxies, Hanbin thinks, as Bobby reaches over and musses up his hair with a metal-clad, bony hand.

 

“So you like Bobby, do you,” Bobby says, more seriously than he should. The boy flirts with all the subtlety of a brick of mud. Hanbin can’t say he doesn’t like it.

 

Hanbin’s halfway through, “You’re ten years too early to play me,” when Bobby drags him in with that hand around his wrist. This close up, Bobby’s lashes are shaded a soft wine red in the backlight, and Hanbin can see the exact way his eyes narrow when he says, “I’m not playing though, Mr. Hanbin.”

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

  
He wakes up to the sight of the hotel ceiling. It’s Sunday still, says the clock beside the TV, but the sun has long set, and his stomach is sending mixed signals between famished and hung-over.

 

Hanbin sits up, vaguely remembering returning sometime in the morning, utterly trashed--a throb swells down his knee--and tripping over the coffee table before, judging by the crippling ache in his neck, passing out on the couch. Or on the footrest beside the couch. It’s hard to tell. Beneath him, Bobby’s splayed out, a jumbled sack of skin and bones like a half-knit scarf, snoring into the lambskin rug.

A truck passes by outside, the sound of water against its tires crisp and clear over the steady drum of rain to the window panes. Los Angeles in January is pleasant and forgettable. How convenient.

 

For a second Hanbin contemplates draping his jacket over Bobby, but that would be too sentimental, and Hanbin’s not one for things he can’t unravel. So he switches on the TV instead.

 

“... _iKON founder and renowned entrepreneur Kim Jinhwan called on the White House today to direct recent efforts_...”

 

Hanbin turns it back off, tossing the remote somewhere he can’t see, out of mind. He closes his eyes until all he hears is the rain washing the windows. It takes him a second after that to realize that Bobby’s snores have stopped.

 

As expected, when Hanbin peers over the edge off the couch, Bobby’s already curled up into a large fetal ball. He’s red all the way down his neck.

 

“We didn’t fuck,” Hanbin says. “You threw up over yourself in the cab so I took your clothes off, and then you passed out. Mr. Bobby.”

 

“I know,” comes the muffled whimper, which would be more endearing if it didn’t sound like it originated from a komodo dragon, “I can remember that much.”

 

“You hungry?”

 

Bobby pauses for a second, hesitating, then, “I have a place. It’s pretty close to here.”

 

The loft he takes Hanbin to is on the other end of town, not far from the club they had crawled out of last night. It looks more like an abandoned office than a residence: a spacious, barren concrete box wearing a worn-down shell of graffiti and splintered walls. There are no couches inside, no pretense of hospitality. A few metal fold-up chairs are lined up against the wall, opposite to the side with the white linen curtains, rippling beside the open windows. The sanded wooden floor shadows Hanbin’s steps in creaks, as if it’d crack any second.

 

Perhaps the only thing that comes close to indulgence is the giant poster of Jesus at the end of the room.

 

“Obviously you don’t worry about being robbed,” Hanbin says, sipping on the instant coffee Bobby had made them. Before him Bobby locates eggs inside an otherwise empty fridge, then rummages the pantry for salt. “Splendid taste, by the way. Jesus. What a classic.”

 

“My mom gave it to me,” Bobby says, cracking the eggs into a mixing bowl. He pulls out a pair of chopsticks from the counter behind them and begins whisking. Hanbin starts wondering exactly what his mom hasn’t given him. Perhaps his mom still does his laundry and tucks him in bed too. “Besides, I kind of like it.”

 

“You like having Jesus breathe down your neck each time you bring a friend over?”

 

“Well, Mr. Hanbin,” Bobby says, suddenly pensive. “This is the first time I brought a friend over. I guess we’ll have to see?”

 

“See, what? This?” Hanbin says, tracing the ridge of Bobby’s belt buckle with his thumb. Hanbin can see his grip on the counter turning white, hear his exhales dipping into a throaty groan. God, Bobby’s so transparent. Without that smoldering runway glare propping him up, he’s just some kid who writes his thoughts on his forehead. Hanbin dips his hand inside Bobby’s shirt, runs it up, past each tensed slab of muscle.

 

When he looks up, Bobby’s got his lip caught between his teeth. A low grunt skids past his throat. Hanbin catches it with his mouth.

 

The loft is all silent save for the water dripping from the tap. As it hits the sink below, Bobby seems to finally hear how hard he’s been breathing.

 

He meets Hanbin’s eyes, half frowning, half blushing, eyes round and lips parted, and Hanbin pushes himself up and over and presses his mouth right over his. The bowl of egg tips over beside them, a sharp clink. Hanbin feels the yolk brushing up against his fingers, tastes the bitter edge of coffee on Bobby’s tongue.

 

The whisk rolls in a small semicircle off the countertop. A clink.

 

Against his palms, Bobby is hard and smooth, all sinew and muscle and beach-tanned skin. But when he kisses back, his touch feels like something Hanbin’s always known, in the back of his head, but has never grasped. And then when he grunts Hanbin’s name, Hanbin suddenly forgets how to inhale.

 

“Hanbin,” Bobby says, again, then pulls away, mouth a wet, bitten pink.

 

All Hanbin knows is to stare at Bobby, who’s put a hand around the back of thigh and—the next thing, Hanbin’s in the air, legs wound around Bobby’s waist, neck hot with Bobby’s heavy, long exhales. Bobby slams him roughly into the wall, chuckles lazy and ragged and dizzying, and Hanbin moans twice harder than he should.

 

“I’m thinking I may need to put Jesus in the closet for this,” Bobby says.

 

Hanbin can’t be bothered to tell him to shut up, so he drags him closer by a fist full of hair and tells him, “Why don’t you let Jesus see how you spread me open and pound my ass,” instead.

 

Bobby says nothing, just grunts, jaw sliding down into this wanting look, as if Hanbin has just ruined every bit of him. “You fucking say that again.”

 

“Spread me wide,” Hanbin mouths, without a sound. He can feel the weight of Bobby’s gaze lingering over his lips, dense and hot and heavy. Bobby’s breathing is shallow and uneven and it snags when Hanbin says,“Fuck me, Kim Jiwon.”

 

 

 

 

  
~

 

 

 

 

  
The display says in tidy black font: _Clear your schedule - J_.

  
It’s been two weeks since Jinhwan sent Hanbin away in Los Angeles. Hanbin would be lying if he said he wasn’t waiting for this.

 

“Who is it?” Bobby asks from inside the pile of pillows, voice rough and slurred with sleep. Beside them the aquarium backlight stains the plane of his shoulder blade violet, so that when Hanbin catches their reflection on the window, double-exposed over the blinking cityscape outside, they look like dismantled pieces of armor. And that’s what Bobby is, right now, buried face-first in the pillows, limbs splayed haphazard, unsuspecting.

 

“A friend,” Hanbin answers easily, reaching to ruffle Bobby’s explosive nest of bed hair. They’d fried it one too many times during Milan fashion week, and then Bobby set half of it on fire in an attempt to home iron it back. Hanbin had been joking about shaving it all off for him all week, but honestly, it’s too much of a joy to pet.

 

“A friend who calls at 4AM?”

 

Hanbin bends down, presses a kiss on the tip of Bobby’s ear. “You call me at 4AM all the time.”

 

Placated, Bobby tangles Hanbin in his arms and drags him closer. He pulls his head up for a second to regard Hanbin, mulish. “Am I just a friend?”

 

Hanbin tries to laugh, but nothing comes out except the silence.

 

Eventually, the silence begins bruising. A little, initially.

 

Then Hanbin says, “A friend with benefits,” and it rips wide fucking open.

 

Bobby’s awake now. In the darkness, it’s hard to make out if the shadows are pooling into a smile or a frown. This isn’t an expression Hanbin is used to seeing on him. “I don’t like that.”

 

 

 

 

~

 

 

 

  
“You’re never obligated to stay,” Jinhwan says from behind the newspaper. Two meters away, his daughter jumps on another round of the carousel. Hanbin watches her struggle to climb the horse. It’s odd how much she looks like her dad. “But did you know? You can’t escape yourself by moving from one place to another.”

 

Hanbin shuffles around in a small, tight circle. He’s completely covered, head to toe, black face mask, hood pulled up, yet he’s never felt so exposed. “I’m not trying to escape. I just thought that maybe I could take a detour. Find myself.”

 

“So where are you planning to go?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“That’s not like you.”

 

“What do you mean, not like me? Do you know me?” Hanbin snaps, hands in his pockets, suddenly irritated. He has no reason to be. He gets that. But maybe he’s just--he wants Jinhwan to be--more upset. He wants Jinhwan to make it seem as if he’s actually worth something.

 

Anything.

 

“Do you?”

 

“I--” Hanbin starts, uncertain.

 

Jinhwan’s smiling now, all sun, the bright, milky blue patch of cloudless summer sky. “That boy, does he?”

 

But Jinhwan, he knows, and that’s why he asked. They both know how Bobby doesn’t understand a thing about Hanbin.

 

In any case, no one does. Not entirely, not even Hanbin himself. He doesn’t know where he’s going, where he’s at, where he came from. All he knows is that he’s in a big game of fetch, all for a pittance. So maybe he got lost, somewhere. Maybe he got lost a long time ago.

 

“You were never like this,” June had said.

 

“It’s like you gave up on being Kim Hanbin,” June had said.

 

“Do you even know who you are anymore?” June had said.

 

“He’s got a wife and a kid. You’re the real fucking MVP, Kim Hanbin,” He had said, years ago, when he stopped by Hanbin’s--Jinhwan’s--no, Hanbin’s penthouse for a visit. Hanbin took him to the rooftop pool, where he uncorked a bottle of some expensive piss shit from 1927 and dumped it into the water.

 

“Do you know how much this is worth?” Hanbin asked, snorting. He was nineteen. He’d walked a red carpet of back to back covers, Vogue and Arena, Harper’s Bazaar to GQ, all the way to the bank. “More than your wage. More than you’d earn opening Paris for the rest of your life. And I can do this. I can do this because I’m rich.”

 

“Good for you,” June said, in his worn out shirt and his ugly, mismatching suit, “I bet you’re really fucking happy.”

 

“Oh, no, I’m elated,” Hanbin replied, before pulling out another bottle of champagne and dumping right over June’s head.

 

When June left, Hanbin rolled up a joint in a couple of hundred-dollar bills and smoked it until he choked. Jinhwan found him beside the pool the next morning, just lying there with two empty bottles. Quiet. Lifeless. He handed Hanbin a proper cigar and said, “You understand, don’t you, that I would never keep you from leaving.”

 

“If you put it that way, what does that make me?” Hanbin asked, as Jinhwan kissed him. On the forehead, on the lips, on his Adam’s apple, down a small trail to his cock, as he bent him in half and pounded his goddamned brains out.

 

Jinhwan never did answer. Maybe that’s why, even now, Hanbin isn’t quite sure.

 

 

 

  
~

 

 

 

  
“I want to be the love of your life,” Bobby decides, finally, a week later. They’re backyard at his Mom’s house in Virginia. Bobby’s got his brother’s dog on his lap and his feet stacked up on Hanbin’s. They’ve been here all night, just listening to each other breathe, to the sway of the willow trees and the distant sigh of the wind; talking, sometimes, about nothing; and now it’s daybreak, and Hanbin’s too tired to sleep, or to pretend to be angry.

 

“Over my dead body,” he says, shifting to a more comfortable spot in the lawn chair. It makes an ancient sort of creak, too noisy in the stentorian squeeze of silence.

 

Bobby isn’t convinced. He sounds like he’s chuckling but when Hanbin glances at him, his expression is totally unreadable. “Invite me over.”

 

“No.”

 

“Please?”

 

“Stop it.”

 

“Hanbin-ah, that’s not fair,” Bobby croons, then erupts into a yodeling shriek, “Hanbin-a-a-a-ah, HA-A-AN-BIN-A-A-AH,” and Hanbin has to jump over him, clamp his mouth shut with a hand and hold his hands down from fighting back but then--then they’re already on the ground, tumbled out of the chair. The dog’s gone. Momentum ran dry. Just the two of them. Breathless. Eyes wide. Far too close.

 

Hanbin looks down at Bobby, who’s got a hand around the small of his back, the other curled around his wrist.

 

“Hanbin,” Bobby says, quietly now, a thousand times louder than anything Hanbin has ever heard before. “Let’s go out.”

 

 

 

  
~

 

 

 

  
Not long after they first met, Jinhwan took Hanbin to run an errand in Venice. Two hours later, Hanbin had the keys to a new flat in Montreal dangling on a chain from his mouth as Jinhwan took him from behind in the brick-paved alleyway between Valentino and Salvatore Ferragamo. He doesn’t remember much of it now. All that remains is the blunt hard edge of Jinhwan’s wedding band digging into his collarbone and the sound of Jinhwan’s belt slamming into his thighs. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. This happened again, a few weeks later, in Beijing. Then Cairo, Buenos Aires, Bangkok. Moscow and Munich and Madrid. Hanbin stopped keeping track long ago, but now, looking at the souvenirs that have piled up, the ancient wine and crocodile skin umbrella and grand Fazioli, it doesn’t seem as negligible of an affair as he’d always imagined it was.

 

“Holy shit,” is the first thing Bobby manages to cough up when he steps into the flat. He’s not so much impressed as he is terrified. And why wouldn’t he be? “I always knew you were balling, because, you know, you’re _B.I_  and all, but _this_ \--is this a Ulysse Nardin watch?”

 

Hanbin squints, not actually sure what it is that Bobby’s holding. “Probably?”

 

“Isn’t this worth more than a Ferrari?”

 

Hanbin isn’t entirely sure. The Ferrari he has downstairs, Jinhwan bought it for him as a birthday present.

 

“ _To drive home with_ ,” said the sticky note on the hood.

 

“You sure own a lot of things,” Bobby says, skipping circles around the Fazioli. “I mean, do you even use any of this? Like,” he points at the Jackson Pollock on the wall, “I didn’t know you were into art?”

 

He’s not. Compared to Bobby, who in his dilapidated ghost town of a home plays guitar and writes substanceless rap lyrics, Hanbin lives a life filled to the brim with things. Exactly that: _things_. But that’s not anything he’s uncomfortable with. The highlight is that he’s filthy rich. This side of the world, money can buy everything. Sure, it can’t buy happiness, but who needs happiness, when you can drown your sorrows in cold hard cash?

 

“I’m not really,” Hanbin says. “Someone gave it to me.”

 

It’s raining again, typical of Montreal. A few people are still loitering on the streets, shouting out slurred French. Hanbin pulls up the blinds and opens the window and waits.

 

Before him Bobby’s gotten painfully silent. Hanbin doesn’t know what to say to him, which is odd, because Hanbin’s good at saying things, making conversation, cracking people open. He makes a living off of it, after all. But maybe that’s the problem. When you make a profession out of living a more likable rendition of yourself, it’s hard to be honest.

 

“Is it the same person that,” Bobby starts, then pauses. “Actually, don’t tell me. You have secrets. Everyone has secrets. It’s none of my business. I know. I get that.”

 

Hanbin doesn’t answer him, because he hasn’t figured out how.

 

“Think it’s going to stop raining?” Bobby asks, after a long while.

 

“Unlikely, considering Montreal,” Hanbin says.

 

Bobby chuckles, humorless, and then stops and they’re back in the suffocating silence.

 

“Not that I mind rain,” Hanbin says.

 

“Why,” Bobby says.

 

“What, why?”

 

“Nothing. You’re just hard to read.” Bobby thinks about something, then laughs to himself. “Somedays, I wonder which side of you is the real thing.”

 

“None of them,” Hanbin says. It’s the frankest thing he’s said all day, maybe this entire time, since the moment they met.

 

Bobby’s got half of his mouth stretched up into an awkward, lopsided chuckle, and it freezes there. “That’s a problem. I happened to like all of them.”

 

“Even the ones you haven’t met?”

 

“Even the ones _you_ haven’t met,” says Bobby, and he’s got that precarious twinkle in his eye again. Hanbin hates that, hates Bobby, hates how he’s got his heart spelt out, hates this young, insolent, thing before him. Hanbin hates it so much he feels his heart squeezing shut in his chest, pain a rusted nail driving right through him.

 

As they say, in life, the same pain hurts you twice. Once in the present. Once in the past. Infinitely, continuously, like a scar that will never go away. And Hanbin, he doesn’t believe he could ever survive a scar like Bobby.

 

So he says, “Bobby, have you ever heard of a kept man?”

 

At first, for a long minute, Bobby does nothing but laugh.

 

Then, “You mean that stuff on TV these days?”

 

Then, “Well, no, I mean, yes, I’ve heard--of course--but you aren’t. Right? Hanbin. Hanbin-ah, tell me.”

 

Then, “Well, but no, it’s… it’s fine if you are. You have your reasons. I’m sure you have your reasons, and everyone has--everyone’s… fuck, sorry, Hanbin. I--love you, I know you think I’m stupid but I, please, just tell me to hang on--” and Hanbin hears it coming before Bobby even manages the next part. Because he’s heard it before. Because, when June said it five years ago, yelled it distraught and enraged like his world was falling apart, the words struck Hanbin somewhere he didn’t think could hurt. They’re still there.

 

Finally, after he’s ran all out of words, “Hanbin, please, say anything.”

 

Hanbin looks at him, blank. Here is the kind of boy who would wait hours in the dead cold of January to pick you up from the subway station. This is someone who despite braving frostbite, would always cup your hands to his mouth to puff on first, who’d pocket your hand in his own jacket, who’d tuck you in at bed just to kiss you on the forehead.

 

The worst thing about falling in love with Bobby is that it’s the loneliest love in the world.

 

Of course it is. It has to be, when you wake up each day realizing that no one will ever love you again like this. No one will ever love you again, not so honestly, so wholly, so unhesitatingly. Not even Bobby himself.

 

“Jiwon, sorry,” Hanbin says. “We’re never going to work out.”

 


End file.
